


venari

by basilisks



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Body Horror, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Strong Haruno Sakura
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-01 21:05:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13303203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/basilisks/pseuds/basilisks
Summary: haruno sakura is dead, but then again, she supposes, in her brain of brains, she was never really alive.there she goes again, worming her way into a crevice of self contempt, drowning it out with eyes full of love and young, obsessive behavior. obsessive, the enthralling zabuza and his frozen, haunting apprentice are dead in a waistland full of ugly, bloated people drowning in poverty.she supposes she is just a little selfish,her heart burns there, aswell.





	venari

Haruno Sakura is dead, but then again, she supposes, in her brain of brains, she was never really alive.

There she goes again, worming her way into a crevice of self contempt, drowning it out with eyes full of love and young, obsessive behavior. Obsessive, the enthralling Zabuza and his frozen, haunting apprentice, Haku, are dead in a wasteland full of ugly, bloated people drowning in poverty.

She supposes she is just a little selfish,

Her heart burns there, as well.

It begins with a novel, The Visage of a Cottonmouth Woman, and she just has to keen, for Sakura loves the tellings of dominated women who overcome with a plan of vengeance. It hadn't even been a single day outside of the village before they were ambushed, and she hated how completely humiliated she felt afterwards. Two men, rogue, missing ninja with gauntlets of serrated, poisoned steel had come from a suspicious circlet of water that she had paid no attention to. She could not tell if she was stupid or blind with faith, or one in the same, but then when it had seemed she surely would perish, her ash haired sensei had risen from a pile of macabre viscera and saved her pretty little neck from being slashed to bloody ribbons. Sakura looked back at the now pile of logs and foliage, and immediately realised that she was in over her head.

A sheep dressed in a velvet qipao with a sharp object shaking in her dainty hand? Her grip was all wrong. Her stance, too. Her fists clenched into a blanche white and suddenly she wanted to throw up.

From there came a series of intervals that she didn't have half the mind to remember. Her beloved, Sasuke, was sitting next to her on a boat ride in a murky lake just after the cusp of her almost demise, shocking, how little she found herself feeling warm next to him. In reality, she wanted to reach up and tug her eyes out. She couldn't get much blinder.

She supposes, Kakashi tried his best to keep her from wanting to run away, back to the safety and warmth of a midsummers day in the terrace of her plum garden. But then came the mist, bloody and thick, she was choking on her own tongue and then, right in front of her stood the replica of what she could only recall as a demon. Towering and beastly, just how sharp were those molars of his underneath that ghastly wrap of cloth over his face.

And then, gradually, there were more of him. More demons made of liquid death, and for all his worth, her salt of the earth sensei could not save her.  
Needless to say, she smiles, in a chagrin, haunted manner, and Sakura Haruno wished that the metaphorical noose tightening around her throat in an agonizingly slow pace would just get it over with.

In a flicker of fear, or self pity, either would work, she found herself throwing one, two, kunai at the demon of the mist. He grinned at her, actually grinned, and batted them away with his cleaver of a sword like they were nothing more than a pair of miniscule fleas. He laughed at her, called her a weak bitch with bad aim, made her hate herself for even trying, and then, like sun and moon, the fox and the raven had threw themselves at the demon, shaking and bleeding, and released the hound who had come back with a newfound sense of vitality.

Their victory was a fleeting one, and Sakura felt all but included.

Her days were occupied with bowls of watery, miso curry breakfasts and dinners, bouts of self destructive coping mechanisms, and lonely, elongated sessions of target practice. Sakura liked to believe that she was quite smart. She knew exactly what she was doing, and if withdrawing herself from whatever fragile semblance of friendship she had made with her team members was to be forgotten in the process, then, so be it.

"Maa, Sakura," Kakashi had found her alone on the riverbed, feet wading in the water with both hands adorning her kunai in a tiring, kata stance. Her arms were quivering and her eyes were clenching over unshed tears, a healthily endowed book encased in a lilac covering to her immediate left. "Care to learn something new?"

And so the sun had set, and the fox and raven, respectively, Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke, were subject to staring at just how high up in the canopy their flighty rosette of a teammate had gotten in the cusp of only two, both successful, trials. And then they watched her sit still as a statue in a form of secluded sharpness. Eyes like blades, aiming to slash through the moon as if it was a mere pumpkin. They had recently noticed, as of late, Sakura seemed so much more quiet. 

Kakashi gouged the girl for a reaction, he received a minuscule expression in return. Sakura laughed a grim laugh in her head and offered him a barely there smile for his efforts, but her smile was all the invitation he figured he needed to crutch his way up the length of the splintered, wooden skyscraper. And then? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Down below, was the distinguishable failed efforts of the two stars of his genin, a ghostly breeze of smoggy wind ruffled his clothes, and finally he noticed the minute trembling of the shoulders of the little girl besides him.

“What have you been reading,” he asks.

“A book,” she responds after a beat.

“What’s it about,” he asks.

He thinks she doesn’t hear him because for a while she does not answer, just, stares heedlessly into the horizon. After awhile, though, she does. “A woman.”

They just sit like that for a while, it feels like eternity for Kakashi. He looks older, Sakura thinks sluggishly. His shoulders are slumped and she can just imagine the downturned lips hidden beneath that mask of navy polyester. Her own frown deepens, he can’t even hide his disinterest for her. 

“Kakashi sensei,” she begins. Hands clenched in her lap and she can just see how her teacher freezes like a deer in headlights. Sakura almost wishes she never said anything, almost wishes she had listened to her mother when she told her that for a civilian girl, her most opportune road in life would be to marry a smart man who could be trusted to take over her father’s merchant tradings. She has an average face and she isn’t necessarily talented at anything. “When you look at me, what do you see?”  
He lies. He is a liar. She expects him to spit out bullshit before she even asks, because that’s what most people do. They lie. You’re a pretty girl, Sakura. You’re so brave, Sakura. 

She recalls her eleventh birthday, frankincense and rose water invading her every inhale because the smell was absolutely everywhere. Dark and floral, the time is past which she should be asleep, but sleep, she cannot. She finds herself along the veranda, pretty, blanche, frosting is smeared along her jaw, she clutches her thin quilt closer to her body and stares up at the big, round eye in the sky. Do you see me? She wonders. But the moon is fleeting. Moving further and further away, shying from her bit by bit. It looks back but it does not notice her. She is a ghost.

Do you see potential?

“I see you, Haruno Sakura,” Kakashi says.

And it’s so obviously condescending. So blatant and cruel with no intention of being that way. Black matter and blue space. Sakura feels as though she could sink into the roots of this great tree and no one would notice.

**Author's Note:**

> this work is an experiment in writing, and is my image of a sakura not fabricated in canon storyline. please be kind to the author, he is not a reliable updater but he does try his best. 
> 
> i suppose the muse for this work is found in the ferality of human nature, oh, and, the saying of how the viper hid underneath the rose.
> 
> the sakura haruno of my image is one who will forge herself into a woman of steel and blood. her body is a temple, the author will try his best not to break it, my dears
> 
> ( pairings, as of now, are undecided )


End file.
